Sunday, October 28, 2007

Today, almost twenty years ago today, L's mother died. She died in a hospital bed, in the middle of the night, shot full of morphine and riddled with cancer. A few days before, I had heard her ask one of the doctors if there was any way, any possible way, she could have just one more year. She was worried, she said, about the twins, L's younger brothers. But she said it without any particular hope. She was a mathematician, specializing in recursion theory, and she understood that, while the definition of a recursive series seems circular, it generally includes a termination point.

The photo was taken in a park somewhere in Paris, before her mother died, before the war. She must have been running ahead, racing with her brother, when her father told her to come back and stand over there, there by the hedges, and to look up, straight into the camera.

One day, one year - it's never enough. A lifetime doesn't feel like enough to make up for all the things I wish I had done differently. It saddens me to think about it - and your post brought me right back to that moment of anticipating the end and the overwhelming sadness. I am terrified, beyond description, that I am going to get breast cancer again and die, when in theory I have a lifetime ahead of me. I'm only 30. You have to live every day like you are going to live forever, while at the exact same time, living like you have only one day left.